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Friday, August 24, 2012

Using Poetic Forms, Part 3: The Sestina

The sestina is a much longer and more intricate form than the sonnet, since it
spans 39 lines. It involves an enormous amount of repetition. That’s the key. The
words that end the lines in the first stanza recur in a weave, according to a
prescribed pattern.

The
sestina keeps switching back on itself like a road winding up a steep mountain,
because the same end words occur seven times in the poem. For this
reason, the sestina lends itself to a question or conundrum that has many facets or variations. The sestina can also be playful, because inserting those words can make
the poem a game the poet plays, utilizing the reader’s anticipation of the
repetition. This can be particularly fun and challenging when a poet uses
homonyms of the end words as variations.

The
sestina's structure is intricate, mathematical. The words that
end the lines in the first stanza recur at the end of the lines in the second
stanza, in this order: 6-1, 5-2, 4-3. Notice how each pair adds up to seven,
the number of stanzas in the whole poem. The last end word in stanza one
becomes the first end word in stanza two. Then the second stanza becomes the
template for the third, repeating in the same weave, so that the last end word
in stanza two becomes the first in stanza three, etc.

Because
of this intricate weave, the sestina is also a useful form to work through an
obsession or to discuss repetitive actions. One terrific example of this is Jan Clausen’s “Sestina: Winchell’s Donut House,” about working in an all-night,
fast-food business. Here are the final three stanzas:

One
thing I love about this sestina of Jan Clausen (she’s written more than one) is
her choice of end words. The word “change” changes slightly each time we hear
it, mirroring the meaning of the word. The repetition of the words “morning”
and “light” underline the yearning of a graveyard-shift worker for a end to
the long nights of labor. The word “alone” conveys the solitude of this job
and the speaker’s life. “Grease” is perfect for a fast-food joint, but it also
has interesting class connotations, as in “lifetimes of grease.” Finally the
word “pink” suggests both the sickly sweet glazes of the donuts (“chocolate and
pink-frosted” in stanza one) and the traditionally feminine coworker Linda, object
of the speaker’s romantic longings during those long nights.

If you
write a sestina, make sure you choose end words that
play directly into the complicated fixations that led you to write the poem.
Otherwise, the sestina form can take control of you like a vengeful robot, and compel
you to repeat yourself in ways that are just—well, repetitive. Repetition is
both the music and pitfall of the sestina.

Also
consider choosing one end word that I would call the “sunflower” word. The poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a double sestina (twelve stanzas of twelve
lines each, and a coda or tornada of
six lines) called “The Complaint of Lisa.” In this poem, Swinburne used the
word “sunflower” as an end word, which meant he had to fit this terribly
specific word into the poem thirteen times. Just for good measure, he threw it in
two other times, for a total of fifteen. Challenge yourself to use as least one
“sunflower” end word, where it’s a tour de force to include the word at least
seven times in your sestina. Remember, homonyms are fair game.

One
thing to avoid with a sestina, unless it’s a humorous poem, is lots of end
words that are so obscure that using them seven times becomes a joke. That will
affect the whole poem by making the form too noticeable, and therefore silly.

I had
the pleasure of studying the origins of the sestina with the scholar Marianne Shapiro (1940–2003), who wrote one of the definitive works on the subject, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina. Francesco
Petrarch is the poet most closely identified with the sestina, since he wrote
so many of them, and popularized the form, which comes from medieval Provençal.

Francesco Petrarch

When I took Professor Shapiro’s course on the Provençal troubadours, I was a
hubris-filled Yale undergraduate who thought I could keep up with Shapiro’s sprinter’s-pace
graduate course. That illusion was dispelled at the end of the first class,
when Professor Shapiro gave us the homework assignment: “For next week, learn
the Provençal language.” Right then, I decided to audit and not take the class for credit.

In Shapiro’s
book on the sestina (which includes an interesting anthology of the form), she
goes deeply into the numerology of the sestina: “To understand the structure of
the sestina, with its tornada in
place of the seventh strophe, it is necessary to examine the form in the
broader context of number symbolism, specifically that surrounding the numbers
6 and 7…” Shapiro goes on to talk about the six days of creation in Genesis, followed
by the seventh day of rest, just as the seventh stanza of the sestina is shorter and different.The fact that the sestina can be mentioned in the same breath as the biblical act of creation gives you some sense of how enormously rich and challenging this form can be. Other recent posts about writing topics: